Photonic integrated circuits, used in a wide range of applications from data transmission and telecommunications to sensing or microscopy, often integrate multiple photonic functions, covering a wide optical wavelength band (from visible to mid-infrared wavelengths). Silicon is a well-established material in electronics and by leveraging the technologies and tools of microelectronics industry silicon is also increasingly becoming the material-of-choice for various photonics related applications. But due to its indirect bandgap, silicon remains an inefficient light emitter, which is a huge drawback particularly for applications related to spectroscopic biosensing, where an efficient broadband light source fully integrated onto photonics circuitry is desirable. The present-day solutions have low power output and low efficiency. For example in heterogeneous integration, semiconductor material from the group elements of the groups 3 and 5 of the periodic table (usually called III-V materials, in the field of semiconductors) is bonded on top of the silicon waveguide. The III-V stack can be processed so as to obtain different types of devices, such as electrically pumped LEDs, in which a broadband light is generated by electrical pumping inducing emission of light in all the directions and where a portion of the light is coupled back to the silicon waveguide. This requires very complex design and fabrication, consumes higher power and is susceptible to processing related issues. While III-V materials have demonstrated higher efficiencies in other applications, such as lasers, the efficiency of these heterogeneous integrated LEDs is very low and the output is weak. Other possible solutions are electrically pumped all-silicon light sources, based on introducing defects or rare-earth doping in silicon (because of the indirect bandgap of this semiconductor), or nanostructuring the silicon itself. The production of these devices is very time-consuming and/or expensive. Besides, all these solutions are not efficient in terms of emitted power in general. A different solution has been proposed in which a light source, such as a laser, is coupled to an optical waveguide. This solution is not satisfactory because the devices rely heavily on a very exact optical alignment, which results in an expensive production and strict packaging requirements, further increasing production costs.